10. Number of billions of dollars in worldwide quarterly factory revenue
approached by Linux: 1

11. Number of consecutive quarters in which Linux servers sales have
exceeded $900 million: 2

12. Peak number of simultaneous listeners to the Linux-powered Radio
Paradise: 5,647

13. Linux market opportunities in China, in millions of dollars by 2008: 41.9

14. Linux market opportunities in Japan, in millions of dollars by 2007: 105

15. Thousands of Linux-certified practitioners at IBM: 3

16. Thousands of people at IBM that have “some kind of Linux
exposure”: 12

17. IBM revenue percentage growth in 2004 over 2003: 20.5

18. Number of Oracle servers at city of Bergen (Norway) moving to
Linux: 8

19. Number of Windows application servers being consolidated to Linux
servers in Bergen: 100

20. Approximate number of Linux servers to which Bergen's app servers
are being consolidated on IBM eServer BladeCenters running Linux: 20

1–11, 17: International Data Corp.

12: Radio Paradise

13–14: International Data Corp. via InternetNews

15, 16: Times of India

18–20: ZDNet

They Said It

Linux servers are playing increasingly
important roles in IT customers' computing infrastructure. They are
taking on enterprise workloads, now that more ISV applications are
available for both technical and commercial workloads on the Linux
server platform.

In addition to the IT-based benefits from migrating to Linux, we attain
a business model that doesn't tie us to a single vendor's solution
architecture. By migrating to Linux, the City of Bergen has a business
model that is open and democratic and, we believe, that will ensure a
greater degree of freedom of choice, more efficient operation and major
cost savings that will benefit the citizens.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

A new process-accounting project, called Enhanced Linux System
Accounting (ELSA), has been started for Linux. Mechanisms for
tracking system behavior on a process-by-process basis already exist; what ELSA proposes
is to collect processes together into banks and assess them as a group.
In theory, other aspects of the system also can be grouped together into
banks for ongoing analysis.

The InterMezzo filesystem has been dropped from the 2.6 Linux kernel on the
grounds that Peter J. Braam has stopped maintaining it, and no one else has
stepped up to take his place. Peter himself acknowledges that InterMezzo can
be maintained adequately as an independent module if anyone cares to do
it
and has helped smooth over Linus
Torvalds' decision to drop it. InterMezzo,
intended for large clusters, server replication, mobile computing and other
high-availability projects, appears not to have been maintained
seriously since 2002, and its mailing lists have been dead for some time. Unless
people become passionate enough about it to pick it up themselves, it is
doubtful the filesystem will return to the mainline Linux kernel tree.

Although 2.6 continues to stabilize, the 2.4 kernel continues to be most users'
first choice for their systems, and a lot of feature swapping takes place
between the 2.4 and 2.6 trees. Marcelo
Tosatti, the 2.4 maintainer, has been
trying to slow down the adoption of new features in 2.4, hoping that users
needing those features would migrate to 2.6. But until Linux 2.6 becomes
firmly established, he has found himself under pressure to accept features
like Serial ATA (SATA) in spite of the fact that stable kernel series are
not supposed to include new features that might destabilize the system.
During all of this, Marcelo also has been hard at work on some 2.6
features,
such as some recent per-user resource limits he submitted in April 2004 to
Andrew Morton, the 2.6 maintainer (along with Linus until 2.7 forks off).

These changes were inspired by the discovery that users could execute a
denial-of-service (DoS) attack by creating too many pending signals, among
other things. Unfortunately, although these fixes certainly are needed for
security reasons, it is possible that the various shells (bash, csh and
others) may need to be updated as well, in order to take advantage of the
new limits. This poses some compatibility problems, making it difficult for
users to upgrade only the kernel if they want, without at the same time
upgrading other software as well.

Every once in a while someone gets a really weird idea and then goes ahead
and implements it. Some would say Linux is itself an example of this, but
another example is the recent attempt by Sergiy
Lozovsky to embed a LISP interpreter
into the 2.6 Linux kernel. The purpose was to allow system administrators to
control the security policies of their systems using a high-level language,
so they wouldn't have to alter the kernel source code and
recompile. Sergiy's LISP interpreter was much simpler and smaller than
Common LISP, taking up much less RAM and running in a virtual machine that
would protect the system from any LISP bugs introduced by careless
system administrators. The worst that would happen is that their security policy
wouldn't work.
There is virtually no chance that this feature will be
accepted into the kernel proper, for several reasons. First, the LISP
language probably is not going to be a favorite with system
administrators who would
want such an interpreter, as they probably would prefer something more
shell-like. And second, because virtually the same thing could be
implemented in user space with no need of embedding the entire interpreter
in the kernel at all. This also would obviate the need for a virtual machine
to protect the system from system administrator programming errors. In spite of any
objections, however, an embedded LISP interpreter in the kernel is fun
to play with and might be the sort of thing to be maintained
for a long time outside of the kernel, by enthusiastic folks who simply like
the weirdness of it all (or who really think it's a good idea).

The entire 2.6 development process is somewhat unusual, even for Linux.
First, Linus Torvalds seemed to hand off development to Andrew Morton, but
then it turned out they would continue to work in tandem. Andrew continued
to produce kernel versions with names like 2.6.6-rc1-mm2, the -mm being a
holdover from when most of his patches had to do with memory management.
Recently he also has begun to release a -mc series, standing for merge
candidate, that is, sets of patches to be merged with Linus' tree. While doing
this, he still has released -mm versions, although presumably
these also are intended to be merged with Linus' tree. From the user
perspective, everything is still clear and calm, because the 2.6.5, 2.6.6, 2.6.7
and so on, releases all still come out and are housed in known locations.
But, unlike the ongoing 2.4 and 2.0 (and theoretically 2.2 as well, although its
maintainer Alan Cox has been fairly quiet lately) development, 2.6
maintenance has seemed to bounce around a bit more than the others.